


Little White Horses (The Drag Him Away Remix)

by arcapelago (arcanewinter)



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Gen, Head Injury, M/M, Major Illness, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-07-03
Packaged: 2018-11-18 12:42:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11290968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arcanewinter/pseuds/arcapelago
Summary: Raven is called away from her activist duties to visit her old home while the school is shut down in wartime.





	Little White Horses (The Drag Him Away Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heyjupiter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyjupiter/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Little White Horsies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/329628) by [heyjupiter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heyjupiter/pseuds/heyjupiter). 



No matter how much it resembled her lingering bitterness over the place, Raven was quietly shocked by the disrepair of the grounds when she arrived. She left the car at the road and walked the rest of the way, pushing her way past a rusted gate half off its hinges, following long cracks in the pavement and stepping over the grass and the clods of earth that widened the divides. In her mind she had expected at least a few parents, a few students, but she seemed to be the only one for miles--and for years.

From a distance, the monolith of the house seemed to have escaped the wear of time, but as she approached she could see there too the tiredness in the stone, the paint peeling around the windows, the dusty stoop by the door that bore the signs of a broom, but not a frequent one. She knocked, and it sounded hollow. A smaller door would surely have led into a mausoleum.

But it was Hank McCoy, a ghost of her past in his own right, who opened the door. His glance over her shoulder seemed one of embarrassment for the state of things, but Raven supposed now that it really was true. It was just Hank now. And Charles.

"I didn't think--" Hank started, but he stopped himself. "Thank you for coming."

She shrugged. Her gaze swept over the dull flagstone of the threshold. As Hank stepped aside for her, she crossed it, her platform heels raising her to his height. "I still don't know how I can help."

"I've tried just about everything else."

She watched him as he closed the door. After her time out in the world she was surprised that there was no bolt to turn, no lock. But there had never been one. "It's hard to believe it's only been five years."

He raised his eyes to her, but he didn't--couldn't--keep them there. He passed her to walk into the cavernous foyer. "It feels like forty."

She followed him inside. Over the staircase landing, dust hung suspended in shafts of sunlight. The air was warm and stale and she could have been dreaming. She could wake up at any moment. She wanted to.

Hank asked if she wanted anything. Water, a soda, some time to rest. She shook her head.

"Let me see him."

*****

Hank led her to a room on the ground floor. It had been cleared of the furniture she remembered--and perhaps cleared again, of desks, of a chalkboard--to make room for the large hospital bed and the various monitors. Charles lay amongst the pillows under a thin blanket, his chest rising and falling slowly under its neat fold.

She willed herself past the doorway, old carpet crushing under her shoes as she followed a narrow path past the foot of the bed and around to a chair at its side. But she did not sit. Charles looked asleep. But not peaceful. It was different. It was difficult to look at him.

"Talk to him if you can," said Hank. "There's a good chance he can hear you."

"But his mind has never reached out to you."

Hank didn't answer until she finally looked over to him. His lips were pursed, and he shrugged. "You're family. It might be different."

She nodded. But she didn't feel it. What kind of family had she been? Who was more family than Hank at this moment?

"I'll try."

*****

Hank's message had found her two nights ago. She hadn't asked how long he'd been trying to find her when she called him. Charles had taken a bad fall on the stairs, Hank had said. The serum he'd been taking was probably to blame, though Hank didn't know if it had been too much, or too little: if he'd drugged himself to delirium or if his legs had failed him unexpectedly. Hank had taken him to a hospital--there was no hope, and no confidence, for treating him at the mansion--but after a month he failed to regain consciousness. But he was stable, and so Hank had taken him home, away from the tests, away from the curious, away from the ambitious.

And then Raven had arrived. And she talked, the way people talk at graves. She talked until she was blue in the face--Charles always liked that stupid joke, and she always told it. "Only it was you who talked 'til I was blue," she reminded him.

She pulled the chair closer. She got up and sat on his bed. She reached over him to brush his hair over the scar. She tried to be the warm and attentive and affectionate sibling he had always been--had usually been.

She tried.

*****

Hank had brought her pillows and a blanket. She slept half in the oversized chair and half along the edge of Charles' bed. When she left the room in the morning the only change was that maybe the bedding was no longer as neat over Charles' chest as it had been. 

She found Hank in the kitchen, but the table he sat at was empty.

"It didn't work," she said. She didn't wait for him to ask. She didn't want the hope. She didn't want to crush it.

He turned around in his chair to look at her. He seemed much older than she knew him to be. "Nothing at all?"

"His hands," she said, looking down at her own. "Sometimes his fingers would curl. I kept thinking it was a signal--but it wasn't."

"I should have warned you," said Hank. "It's the most he ever does."

She hadn't brought a bag. If she had, it could have been obvious. She could have hefted it over her shoulder, and it would have been said for her. Leaving, I'm leaving, it's what I do, it's where I go. _Don't get up, I'm already gone._

She forced her steps into the kitchen. She walked to the counter by the sink and took a mug from the cupboard--two mugs from the cupboard--and filled them with coffee.

"You got a spare room for me here?"

Hank still looked astounded when she turned from the counter, but he recovered.

"We've got fifty."

*****

Three hundred miles away, and quite a ways down, Erik's guards had begun to watch him more closely. After five years of solitary confinement, he supposed it came as no surprise to them that their prisoner had begun to lose his mind.

But as in all things, they were wrong.

In the middle of the bright, warm floor, Erik sat with his legs folded under him. He reached out and moved a smoothly carved knight that wasn't there, and he glanced up with a smile at someone who was.


End file.
